overcast my heart that I was unable to distinguish pure affection 
from unholy desire.  Both boiled confusedly within me, and dragged 
my unstable youth down over the cliffs of unchaste desires and 
plunged me into a gulf of infamy.  Thy anger had come upon me, and 
I knew it not.  I had been deafened by the clanking of the chains 
of my mortality, the punishment for my soul's pride, and I 
wandered farther from thee, and thou didst permit me to do so.  I 
was tossed to and fro, and wasted, and poured out, and I boiled 
over in my fornications -- and yet thou didst hold thy peace, O my 
tardy Joy!  Thou didst still hold thy peace, and I wandered still 
farther from thee into more and yet more barren fields of sorrow, 
in proud dejection and restless lassitude.

     3.  If only there had been someone to regulate my disorder 
and turn to my profit the fleeting beauties of the things around 
me, and to fix a bound to their sweetness, so that the tides of my 
youth might have spent themselves upon the shore of marriage!  
Then they might have been tranquilized and satisfied with having 
children, as thy law prescribes, O Lord -- O thou who dost form 
the offspring of our death and art able also with a tender hand to 
blunt the thorns which were excluded from thy paradise![41]  For 
thy omnipotence is not far from us even when we are far from thee.  
Now, on the other hand, I might have given more vigilant heed to 
the voice from the clouds: "Nevertheless, such shall have trouble 
in the flesh, but I spare you,"[42] and, "It is good for a man not 
to touch a woman,"[43] and, "He that is unmarried cares for the 
things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord; but he 
that is married cares for the things that are of the world, how he 
may please his wife."[44]  I should have listened more attentively 
to these words, and, thus having been "made a eunuch for the 
Kingdom of Heaven's sake,"[45] I would have with greater happiness 
expected thy embraces.

     4.  But, fool that I was, I foamed in my wickedness as the 
sea and, forsaking thee, followed the rushing of my own tide, and 
burst out of all thy bounds.  But I did not escape thy scourges.  
For what mortal can do so?  Thou wast always by me, mercifully 
angry and flavoring all my unlawful pleasures with bitter 
discontent, in order that I might seek pleasures free from 
discontent.  But where could I find such pleasure save in thee, O 
Lord -- save in thee, who dost teach us by sorrow, who woundest us 
to heal us, and dost kill us that we may not die apart from thee.  
Where was I, and how far was I exiled from the delights of thy 
house, in that sixteenth year of the age of my flesh, when the 
madness of lust held full sway in me -- that madness which grants 
indulgence to human shamelessness, even though it is forbidden by 
thy laws -- and I gave myself entirely to it?  Meanwhile, my 
family took no care to save me from ruin by marriage, for their 
sole care was that I should learn how to make a powerful speech 
and become a persuasive orator.

                          CHAPTER III

     5.  Now, in that year my studies were interrupted.  I had 
come back from Madaura, a neighboring city[46] where I had gone to 
study grammar and rhetoric; and the money for a further term at 
Carthage was being got together for me.  This project was more a 
matter of my father's ambition than of his means, for he was only 
a poor citizen of Tagaste.  

     To whom am I narrating all this?  Not to thee, O my God, but 
to my own kind in thy presence -- to that small part of the human 
race who may chance to come upon these writings.  And to what end?  
That I and all who read them may understand what depths there are 
from which we are to cry unto thee.[47]  For what is more surely 
heard in thy ear than a confessing heart and a faithful life?  

     Who did not extol and praise my father, because he went quite 
beyond his means to supply his son with the necessary expenses for 
a far journey in the interest of his education?  For many far 
richer citizens did not do so much for their children.  Still, 
this same father troubled himself not at all as to how I was 
progressing toward thee nor how chaste I was, just so long as I 
was skillful in speaking -- no matter how barren I was to thy 
tillage, O God, who art the one true and good Lord of my heart, 
which is thy field.[48] 

     6.  During that sixteenth year of my age, I lived with my 
parents, having a holiday from school for a time -- this idleness 
imposed upon me by my parents' straitened finances.  The 
thornbushes of lust grew rank about my head, and there was no hand 
to root them out.  Indeed, when my father saw me one day at the 
baths and perceived that I was becoming a man, and was showing the 
signs of adolescence, he joyfully told my mother about it as if 
already looking forward to grandchildren, rejoicing in that sort 
of inebriation in which the world so often forgets thee, its 
Creator, and falls in love with thy creature instead of thee -- 
the inebriation of that invisible wine of a perverted will which 
turns and bows down to infamy.  But in my mother's breast thou 
hadst already begun to build thy temple and the foundation of thy 
holy habitation -- whereas my father was only a catechumen, and 
that but recently.  She was, therefore, startled with a holy fear 
and trembling: for though I had not yet been baptized, she feared 
those crooked ways in which they walk who turn their backs to thee 
and not their faces.

     7.  Woe is me!  Do I dare affirm that thou didst hold thy 
peace, O my God, while I wandered farther away from thee?  Didst 
thou really then hold thy peace?  Then whose words were they but 
thine which by my mother, thy faithful handmaid, thou didst pour